


like the stripped fields

by westwind



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Abuse of Power, Disordered Eating, Gen, Pre-Stream Backstory, Trauma, institutionalization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 02:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20382136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwind/pseuds/westwind
Summary: "But it wasn’t until he saw the Soltryce Academy’s library for the first time that he understood: calling those past feelingshungerwas likening a firefly to fire."Caleb Widogast's life and identity through feast and famine.





	like the stripped fields

**Author's Note:**

> "It does me no good; violence has changed me.  
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;  
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,  
with the sense it is being tested."
> 
> —["October" by Louise Glück](https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/08/16/october-louise-gluck/)

Nothing leaves the catalog of his mind no matter how deeply he tucks it away, and so he can remember those silver mornings with first frost at the windowpanes and fresh bread steaming on the kitchen table. And butter the color of sunrise sitting in the cracked dish beside a jar of sweet blackberry jam. After, they always left a portion of the crust in a bowl with a bit of milk for the folk of the woods. 

The pages all fan out: burning his tongue on the too-eager first bite of thick rabbit stew, and rolling out dough for dumplings with his mother’s hands guiding his, and tasting marzipan sticky on his tongue while his father strings up holly garlands.

He can remember, too, when the child who was Bren grew old enough to notice how precisely, how mathematically the morning’s bread was portioned out. How sometimes his bowl of soup tasted more like the memory of meat than the fact of the thing. Even while his limbs were growing longer and his stomach was always growling, he’d protest when his mother spooned a helping of potatoes from her plate onto his. She’d ignore him and laugh something about how he must’ve gotten at least an inch taller just between breakfast and supper. His father, he’d be more direct: “Eat, boy.”

It wasn’t the first thing that he thought of when Archmage Ikithon of the Cerberus Assembly came to their door, or even the tenth. But lying in bed that night—once thoughts of magic, and libraries, and a gold-braided uniform to match the one his father kept in a chest in the attic finally slowed their chase through his mind—lying in bed he closed his eyes and saw his mother’s hands measuring wheat from the sack. He saw the sack of gold he could bring back to their home one day, and all the fine grain it could buy. And until then, two plates on the table instead of three. 

—

The young man who was Bren had thought he’d known hunger, before. He’d thought it was rainy afternoons reading his family’s dog-eared almanac, the only book in the house, over and over until he could close his eyes and see the words printed across his eyelids. Or it was his thirteenth nameday, unwrapping a text on beginners’ cantrips bound in faded leather and his fingers trembling as he brushed them across the cover. 

But it wasn’t until he saw the Soltryce Academy’s library for the first time that he understood: calling those past feelings _hunger_ was likening a firefly to fire. Elbow-deep in those stacks of books, he learned to truly feel fullness, too. 

It was like their first evening at the academy, him and Astrid and Eodwulf. After all the marble hallways and gilded staircases and a hundred names and places to learn, they trailed behind Archmage Ikithon to a room filled with long tables and what looked like a whole town’s worth of people sitting at them and eating. One table they passed was packed with students around their age, all of them laughing and chatting and elbowing one other. The archmage kept walking to a smaller, empty table. They sat down.

The archmage spent most of the meal speaking in that quiet, dry voice that’d made him lean forward to pay close attention the first time they’d met. They were special, the archmage said. They were talented in a way that the academy’s other students were not, and so they would have to keep themselves apart to help that talent grow. He tried to concentrate carefully on the words, but the endless parade of dishes brought to their table distracted him—meats he didn’t know if he’d ever tasted before drowned in savory sauces, and fresh fruits in the middle of winter, and improbable constructions of pastry and sugar.

By the time the archmage dismissed them to their new rooms, he was drunk on sweetness and fat and brandy stronger than he had ever had in Blumenthal. Yes—they had their own rooms, while the rest of Soltryce’s students bunked three or four to a chamber. The three of them ended up slumped across Astrid’s bed all the same, none of them wanting to go off to their neat, empty boxes quite yet.

“We’ll live like emperors,” Eodwulf said at one point, kicking his heels against the mattress for emphasis. Astrid’s raised eyebrow made him amend, “And like empresses, too. Can you believe all that food?”

For nearly the first time since they sat down to table, the young man who was Bren started to speak. He meant to say something intelligent about power, or about promise, but instead he remembered the stacks and stacks of sugared cakes and said, “I feel a bit sick.”

They laughed at him, then, and he laughed too. It was the most laughter that room would hold for a long time. 

—

Because Eodwulf was wrong—they lived like an emperor’s soldiers. All three had known a farm’s hard work, but not this kind of work, juggling facts and incantations in their heads while spending every moment learning to break codes, or to identify a poison by its odor, or to knife a man in the ribs so he wouldn’t cry out. Those were the things soldiers did, the archmage told them.

The student who was Bren excelled at every task. His mind and body ached when he sank into bed at night, but in the space between waking and sleep, he imagined himself a hearthfire coming to life, taking in every bit of kindling it was fed for fuel. Or some nights he didn’t sleep, and didn’t eat, just burned like the lamplight flickering across the pages of his books. 

In his sixteenth year, he gazed into the looking-glass and was no longer sure if his mother and father would know him anymore. Tall. Eyes fever-bright but ringed with shadow. Dagger-thin beneath the uniform. Astrid and Eodwulf had changed, too—sometimes as they walked the academy’s halls together, he saw the three of them as a pack of hunting dogs like the ones Archmage Ikithon kept chained down with the prisoners. Lean. Hungry. 

But he hadn’t nearly finished his transformation, then. That happened when the archmage led them down to the belly of the Cerberus Assembly, past the chained dogs and the chained men and into a small room. Showed them the gleaming stone and told them what would be done.

He never refused a command, not because his will was particularly pliable but because it pleased him to demonstrate how easily and cleverly he could follow any order. Still, in that room, he hesitated. He traced a palm over his pale wrist and felt his heartbeat strong under the unbroken skin. “No.”

The archmage did not shout or grimace in disapproval. He asked what the student who was Bren had said, as if he hadn’t quite heard, and when the quiet no was repeated, the archmage instructed him to leave the Assembly and return to his chambers. Neither Astrid nor Eodwulf looked at him as he went.

That evening at their table, he reached to serve himself from the first of the succession of dishes but halted when he heard the archmage’s flat repetition: “No.” 

He almost never refused a command, and this one was not unfamiliar. Students who performed well—performed as expected—would eat, and those who did not would not. He sat with his back straight throughout the meal and watched his friends silently struggle to manipulate their cutlery with bandaged arms and hands. 

There was a distance between him and the others, then, but after three days Astrid cornered him in a hallway. “This is insane. He . . . he couldn’t stop you from going by the kitchens, or something. You need to eat.”

He only shook his head and stared at the bandages on Astrid’s left wrist. It was true that none of them had ever missed more than a meal or two, before, but—there was a game here, or a puzzle. He was good at those. He would follow the instructions properly and he would win.

“Idiot,” Astrid said into his silence, more exasperated than fond. But she slipped something into his hand, a hunk of bread, and he let his fingers close around it.

It wasn’t the hunger that swayed him on the seventh day. He might’ve told himself that, but the trembling in his limbs and the sluggishness in his mind were secondary to what he had seen the other two accomplishing now during their practice with spells. The magic burning through their perfect conduits, making his own power seem weak as a candle’s flame. He was already faint before it came time for the cutting and the blood. 

—

Afterward, his body was a stranger. He was walking around inside a house, a house he didn’t know, and when he looked through the windows, he saw hands belonging to someone he might’ve met once a long time ago. It was hard to remember to care for someone else’s body. It was hard to remember the feeling of a cat’s fur beneath the fingers, or a crisp apple on the tongue.

If he were in the business of forgetting, he could pretend he had no mastery over the stranger-body during that time. But nothing leaves the catalog of his mind, and he knows that the stranger-body did as he bid it.

—

The man who was—just the man who was, always past tense—did not eat, when he first came to the quiet place with its bare walls and barred windows. The people there were very insistent that he do so, and they asked and cajoled and continued to place strange concoctions of mush and grit in front of him regardless of his stillness and silence. 

He would explain it to them, if he had words. He had done something wrong—not refused a command, carried one out too well—and so he was not entitled to food. He did not know when he could make up for this error, or how. Best to wait for orders. 

Besides, his body did not want to eat, either. This was discovered when the people held him down and forced the food-stuff into his mouth, one spoonful at a time. He was ill. He continued to be ill when the performance was repeated. Some piece of him far back in memory that would’ve laughed at absurdities like this decided that it served the people right. 

He must’ve survived on something, those eleven years. He could rummage for the evidence in his mind if he wanted to, but he prefers to leave some things buried at the bottom of the stacks.

—

His father taught him the ways of the forest once, how to find roots and berries that were good to eat and which plants would kill instead. He tried to remember the lessons in that low, steady Zemnian even when recalling brought on the shaking and the roaring whiteness that ate up thought and memory both. He tried to ignore the other voice, the one that would recite the method of refining a tree’s bark into poison that could kill before the dinner dishes were cleared. 

So he choked down bellyfuls of leaves and vied for cast-out scraps with the stray dogs when he passed on the outskirts of a town. That was right, and good, and simple. He had been too many things, but now he only had to be a machine that sought warmth and food and silence. 

Things became complicated in the jail cell. A book—he’d tried to pocket a merchant’s book, while his legs trembled from not having eaten that day. It was always the other sort of hunger that got him into trouble. But he was there, behind bars again—the thought made his forearms itch beneath the wrappings—when the shrill voice asked him if he was going to finish the greenish hunk of bread that’d been shoved to him through the door-slot. 

Pushing the bread through the bars to the adjoining cell was a small price to pay for what became escape. He refused to think of the goblin girl as anything more, even once they were outside and walking the same road together, because the fugitive who was Caleb did not have allies. 

He had a cat. He had a traveling companion, and that meant he had the unfamiliar weight of coin in his pocket because Nott was full of ideas about how to acquire it. Ideas were unfamiliar, too. Sometimes in those days he imagined his mind as Frumpkin slowly blinking awake and stretching after a long nap.

The first night that they ate in a proper tavern—with Nott’s mask fastened on tight and his hood pulled up—he tucked into his roast chicken like he was an ordinary patron fit to eat with a fork and a knife and even a mug of ale. When his meal was only half gone his stomach roiled. He felt full, and warm, and it made him nauseous. Hunger was sharp and clean and right.

“You should have more,” he told Nott as he pushed his plate toward her, twisting the words until they could sound cheerful if you looked at them sideways. “It was your idea, besides, with the arrows and the shopkeep.”

She looked him over with those enormous eyes, but she made the meat disappear behind her mask within minutes all the same. And that was the way it was with them. She might give him a thoughtful glance when half his toast ended up on her plate at breakfast, but she never asked questions. He was nearly more grateful for her quiet than for that day in the jail. 

—

The first few months with their odd little group were too strange and hectic for him to give it much notice. So many voices and shifts of expression to keep track of, so many new liabilities in his calculations. Meaning that it was nearly a surprise, that night when Jester turned to poke at his arm—near the shoulder and not lower, thankfully—while they were all sitting around a table at the Lavish Chateu. 

“You know, Caleb,” she said, “you do not look so much like a leftover scarecrow lately. Even if your elbows are still really knobby. I’m glad you’re eating more.”

He frowned. His coat was slung over the back of his stool in the Menagerie Coast heat, but he pulled it back on with measured movements. He realized that some sort of response was required. “It is easy, with your mother taking such good care of us.”

Of course Jester noticed how flat his voice was, and all the rest. Her tail drooped behind her. “I was only trying to say that you look nice.”

“If you say so.” He ate precisely enough of their meal not to draw attention that evening.

—

Or there was another time, when he was drawing out a ritual spell on the floor of an inn room with Fjord and Caduceus helping. “If you will look in my coat, the largest pocket on the left, you will find some powdered silver,” he said over his shoulder. 

There was the sound of rummaging from where his coat hung on a peg beside his book holsters, and then, “Hey, what on earth kinda spell do you cast with this?”

He turned to see Fjord brandishing a hunk of cheese that’d gone moldy, probably from being secreted in a pocket for far too long. Bit down on an irrational feeling of panic. But Fjord was still fumbling around in the fabric, pulling out a handful of unwrapped sweets and some jerky and—“_Hör auf_!” he snapped.

Fjord’s hands fell to his sides and he opened his mouth like he was going to apologize, but before he could make everything worse, Caduceus held up the small sack of silver. “Found it, I think.”

He finished the ritual. No one said anything else about his coat. But when Caduceus was following Fjord out the door for the evening, he said over his shoulder, “You know, I always have my Create Food and Water spell handy.” 

The wizard who was Caleb Widogast of the Mighty Nein knew. It was all the other things he’d been clamoring around in his skull that were the problem.

—

One night, drinking with Beauregard, she said, “Sometimes I feel like my body’s just a weapon. You know what I mean?” She studied her knuckles where the skin had split and then been formed smooth and new by Jester’s healing spell. 

He took a long sip of his drink and felt the liquid slide down his throat and into his belly, half cool comfort and half morbid fascination. “I think I do, but perhaps in a slightly different way. And less so, now. Still very often, but less so.”


End file.
